VAJPAYEE: The Ascent of the Hindu Right, 1924–1977

VAJPAYEE: The Ascent of the Hindu Right, 1924–1977 by Abhishek Choudhary
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A factual, no-holds-barred portrait of this most human of leaders – warts and all – and, thankfully not a hagiography. He was, despite his failings, a bon vivant, cannabis aficionado, unabashed gourmand/epicure, and one of the best orators on the Indian political scene. He may have been an avowed votary of Hindutva earlier on in his political career as evidenced by this poem of his

मैं शंकर का वह क्रोधानल कर सकता जगती क्षार-क्षार।
डमरू की वह प्रलय-ध्वनि हूं जिसमें नचता भीषण संहार।
रणचण्डी की अतृप्त प्यास, मैं दुर्गा का उन्मत्त हास।
मैं यम की प्रलयंकर पुकार, जलते मरघट का धुआंधारय।

फिर अन्तरतम की ज्वाला से, जगती में आग लगा दूं मैं।
यदि धधक उठे जल, थल, अम्बर, जड़, चेतन तो कैसा विस्मय?
हिन्दू तन-मन, हिन्दू जीवन, रग-रग हिन्दू मेरा परिचय!

मैं आदि पुरुष, निर्भयता का वरदान लिए आया भू पर।
पय पीकर सब मरते आए, मैं अमर हुआ लो विष पी कर।
अधरों की प्यास बुझाई है, पी कर मैंने वह आग प्रखर।
हो जाती दुनिया भस्मसात्, जिसको पल भर में ही छूकर।

भय से व्याकुल फिर दुनिया ने प्रारंभ किया मेरा पूजन।
मैं नर, नारायण, नीलकंठ बन गया न इस में कुछ संशय।
हिन्दू तन-मन, हिन्दू जीवन, रग-रग हिन्दू मेरा परिचय!

मैं अखिल विश्व का गुरु महान्, देता विद्या का अमरदान।
मैंने दिखलाया मुक्ति-मार्ग, मैंने सिखलाया ब्रह्मज्ञान।
मेरे वेदों का ज्ञान अमर, मेरे वेदों की ज्योति प्रखर।
मानव के मन का अंधकार, क्या कभी सामने सका ठहर?
मेरा स्वर नभ में घहर-घहर, सागर के जल में छहर-छहर।

इस कोने से उस कोने तक, कर सकता जगती सौरभमय।
हिन्दू तन-मन, हिन्दू जीवन, रग-रग हिन्दू मेरा परिचय!

मैं तेज पुंज, तमलीन जगत में फैलाया मैंने प्रकाश।
जगती का रच करके विनाश, कब चाहा है निज का विकास?
शरणागत की रक्षा की है, मैंने अपना जीवन दे कर।
विश्वास नहीं यदि आता तो साक्षी है यह इतिहास अमर।

यदि आज देहली के खण्डहर, सदियों की निद्रा से जगकर।
गुंजार उठे उंचे स्वर से 'हिन्दू की जय' तो क्या विस्मय?
हिन्दू तन-मन, हिन्दू जीवन, रग-रग हिन्दू मेरा परिचय!

दुनिया के वीराने पथ पर जब-जब नर ने खाई ठोकर।
दो आंसू शेष बचा पाया जब-जब मानव सब कुछ खोकर।
मैं आया तभी द्रवित हो कर, मैं आया ज्ञानदीप ले कर।
भूला-भटका मानव पथ पर ‍चल निकला सोते से जग कर।

पथ के आवर्तों से थक कर, जो बैठ गया आधे पथ पर।
उस नर को राह दिखाना ही मेरा सदैव का दृढ़ निश्चय।
हिन्दू तन-मन, हिन्दू जीवन, रग-रग हिन्दू मेरा परिचय!

मैंने छाती का लहू पिला पाले विदेश के क्षुधित लाल।
मुझ को मानव में भेद नहीं, मेरा अंतस्थल वर विशाल।
जग के ठुकराए लोगों को, लो मेरे घर का खुला द्वार।
अपना सब कुछ लुटा चुका, फिर भी अक्षय है धनागार।

मेरा हीरा पाकर ज्योतित परकीयों का वह राजमुकुट।
यदि इन चरणों पर झुक जाए कल वह किरीट तो क्या विस्मय?
हिन्दू तन-मन, हिन्दू जीवन, रग-रग हिन्दू मेरा परिचय!

मैं ‍वीर पुत्र, मेरी जननी के जगती में जौहर अपार।
अकबर के पुत्रों से पूछो, क्या याद उन्हें मीना बाजार?
क्या याद उन्हें चित्तौड़ दुर्ग में जलने वाला आग प्रखर?
जब हाय सहस्रों माताएं, तिल-तिल जलकर हो गईं अमर।

वह बुझने वाली आग नहीं, रग-रग में उसे समाए हूं।
यदि कभी अचानक फूट पड़े विप्लव लेकर तो क्या विस्मय?
हिन्दू तन-मन, हिन्दू जीवन, रग-रग हिन्दू मेरा परिचय!

होकर स्वतंत्र मैंने कब चाहा है कर लूं जग को गुलाम?
मैंने तो सदा सिखाया करना अपने मन को गुलाम।
गोपाल-राम के नामों पर कब मैंने अत्याचार किए?
कब दुनिया को हिन्दू करने घर-घर में नरसंहार किए?

कब बतलाए काबुल में जा कर कितनी मस्जिद तोड़ीं?
भूभाग नहीं, शत-शत मानव के हृदय जीतने का निश्चय।
हिन्दू तन-मन, हिन्दू जीवन, रग-रग हिन्दू मेरा परिचय!

मैं एक बिंदु, परिपूर्ण सिन्धु है यह मेरा हिन्दू समाज।
मेरा-इसका संबंध अमर, मैं व्यक्ति और यह है समाज।
इससे मैंने पाया तन-मन, इससे मैंने पाया जीवन।
मेरा तो बस कर्तव्य यही, कर दूं सब कुछ इसके अर्पण।

मैं तो समाज की थाती हूं, मैं तो समाज का हूं सेवक।
मैं तो समष्टि के लिए व्यष्टि का कर सकता बलिदान अभय।
हिन्दू तन-मन, हिन्दू जीवन, रग-रग हिन्दू मेरा परिचय!
अटल बिहारी वाजपेयी

but later on he moderated his rigid views and turned more secular. Of course, he was instrumental in the promotion of the present PM Narendra Modi. The book details his maturing as a politician accompanied by similar expansion of RSS. There is a detailed account of the birth of Jan Sangh – with its iconic election symbol of a lit earthen lamp – the Deepak, its ups and downs and the final emergence of the BJP – the present political dispensation ruling the country after decimating the opposition.
Before the Congress eschewed its pro-Hindu stance towards a more pro-non-Hindu position that persists now, this was the prevailing sentiment

It speaks volumes of the porous boundary between the Congress and RSS-Mahasabha – and between secularism and communalism – that the man who made the arrangements for Gandhi’s cremation was the son of a prominent Mahasabha leader. Assisted by Sangh volunteers, Sharma floated the “Council of Civil Liberties” – Janadhikar Samiti – and began to meet every major politician to argue the RSS’s innocence.

A schism in Congress led by Nehru and Patel factions that could have been permanent, if hadn’t been for Patel’s premature death could have been due to Nehru’s utterances like

“Urdu belongs more to UP than to the whole of Pakstan … I see no beauty or grace or exactitude in the new Hindi that is developing in the UP for official purposes. That seems to me rather a tragedy.”

Some of the issues that were close to Vajpayee’s heart were in evidence right from the beginning of his political career like the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, banning cow-slaughter and the reversing of partition.
The advice that Golwalkar imparted to Vajpayee can now be seen as fruition of the RSS philosophy

an ideological party would not manage to capture power, though it could happily exist as a powerful pressure group. The Jan Sangh’s only option was to compromise ideology for power. Once they had attained power, they could mould the body politic as per their desire.

A fascinating book – eagerly awaiting he sequel…

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Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Hyperion by Dan Simmons
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hyperion
An ode to Keats (the poet being paid in the same coin – after penning odes to Indolence, Melancholy, Psyche, Night Grecian urns and Nightingales). There are enough references and allusions to Keats – the title of the book, Lamia, Endymion, Homer and the Greek Titans, (Fanny) Brawne, Port Romance. The book is a repository to other tropes – time travel and FTL, space battles, horror, gore, cyber punk

Datumplane is itself an abstract. A commingling of computer and AI-generated dataspheres and the quasi-perpetual Gibsoian matrix designed originally for human operators, now accepted as common ground for man, machine and AI.

There is an example of syzygy and junk-food

In the twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

There are references to Yeats (translator of The Upanishads), Chaucer, Wizard of Oz, Milton, Hitler, Tom Sawyer. It reads like H Rider Haggard meeting HG Wells meeting Asimov and Peter F Hamilton among others.

’Let there be life!’ And so, somewhere in the Technosphere vaults of my mother’s estate, frozen sperm from my long-dead daddy was defrosted, set in suspension, shaken like the vanilla malts of yore, loaded into something part squirt gun part dildo, and – at the magic touch of a trigger – ejaculated into Mother at a time when the moon was full and the egg was ripe.
Mother didn’t have to be impregnated in this barbaric fashion, of course. She could have chosen ex utero fertilization, a male lover with a transplant of Daddy’s DNA, a clonal surrogate, a gene-spliced virgin birth, you name it … but, as she told me later, she opened her legs to tradition.

A riotous read. On to the sequel…

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The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An insider’s look into the world of genetic goulash – hybrids, miscegenation, chimeras, cross-breeds, mongrels, alloys, amalgams, sexual salmagundi, mitochondrial mishmash – call them what you will.

These people have their dances and dinners and card parties, their musicals and their literary societies. The women attend social affairs dressed in good taste, and the men in evening dress suits which they own; and the reader will make a mistake to confound these entertainments with the “Bellman’s Balls” and “Whitewashers’ Picnics” and “Lime Kiln Clubs” with which the humorous press of the country illustrates “Cullud Sassiety.”

More specifically, the book gives an in-depth look at the schizophrenic world of mulattoes with their socio-cutural loyalties split between those of the whites and blacks.

I have since learned that this ability to laugh heartily is, in part, the salvation of the American Negro; it does much to keep him from going the way of the Indian…
Through my music teaching and my not absolutely irregular attendance at church, I became acquainted with the best class of coloured people in Jacksonville. This was really my entrance into the race. It was my initiation into what I have termed the freemasonry of the race. I had formulated a theory of what it was to be colored, now I was getting the practice…
It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree.

An engrossing book.

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Excession by Iain M. Banks

Excession by Iain M. Banks
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Here is GSV Ethics Gradient's response to the first contact with the alien entity from another Universe/Dimension as a warning to other space-ships. I love this kind of pseudoscientific gobbledegook.

Excession notice @c18519938.52314.
Constitutes formal All-ships Warning Level 0.
Excession.
Confirmed precedent-breach. Type K7 ˆ. True class non-estimal. Its status: Active. Aware. Contactiphile. Uninvasive sf. LocStatre: Esperi (star).
First CommAtt (its, following shear-by contact via my primary scanner @ n4.855.0065.59312) @ n4.855.0065.59487 in M1-a16 & Galin II tight beam, type 4A. PTA & Hand shake burst as appended, x@ 0.7Y. Suspect signal gleaned form Z-E lalsaer ComBeam spread, 2nd Era. xContact sall signed ‘I’. No other signals registered.
My subsequent actions: maintained course and speed, skim declutched primary scanner to mimic 50%closer approach, began full HS passive scan (sync./start of signal sequence, as above), sent buffered Galin II pro-forma message-reception confirmation signal to contact location, dedicated track scanner @ 19% power and 300% beam spread to contact @ -5% primary scanner roll-off point, instigated 2exponential slow-to-stop line manoeuvre synchronised to skein-local stop-point @ 12% of track scanner range limit, ran full systems check as detailed, executed slow/4 swing-around then retraced course to previous closest approach point and stop @ standard 2ex curve. Holding there.
Excessions’s physical characteristics: (¡am!) sphere rad. 53.34 km, mass (non-estimal by space-time fabric influence – locality ambiently planar – estimated by pan-polarity material density norms at 1.45x813t. Layered fractal matter-type-intricate structure, self supporting, open to (field-filtered) vacuum, anomalous field presence inferred from 821 kHz leakage. Affirm K7ˆ category by HS topology & eG links (inf and ult.). eG details non-estimal. DiaGlyph files attached.
Associated anomalous materials presence: several highly dispersed detritus clouds all within 28 minutes, three consistent with staged destruction of >.1m3 near-equiv-tech entity, another ditto approx. 38 partially exhausted M-DAWS .1 cal rounds, another consisting of general hi-soph level (O2-atmosphered) ship-internal combat debris. Latter drifting away from excessions’s position. Retracks to debris clouds expansion profiles indicates mutual age of 52.5 days. Combat debris cloud implicitly originating @ a point 948 milliseconds form excession’s current position. DiaGlyph files attached.
No other presences apparent to within 30 years.
My status: H&H, unTouched. L8 secure post-system-scour (100%). ATDPSs engaged. CRTTDPSs engaged.
Repeat:
Excession eG (inf. & Ult.) linked, confirmed.
eGrid link details non-estimal.
True class non-entimal.
Awaiting.
@n4.28.855.0073.64523…
…PS:
Gulp.>

That almost-human exclamation of fear at the end is just so cute. This kind of gibberish is essentially the conversations of the Minds of space-ships of The Culture of all hues and persuasions and shows the egos, idiosyncrasies and foibles of the leviathans of space.
In The Player of Games Banks’ answer to Douglas Adams’ intoxicant – the ‘Pan-galactic gargle-blaster’ was

I’d like a double standard measure of staol and chilled Shungusteriaung warp-wing liver wine bottoming a mouth of white Effyre-Spin cruchen-spirit in a slush of medium cascalo, topped with toasted weirdberries and served in a number three strength Tipprawlic osmosis-bowl, or your best approximation thereof.’

Here the inebriant is

The 9050 was a cocktail which notoriously involved about three hundred processes to make, many of them involving unlikely and even unpleasant combinations of plants, animals, and substances. The end result was an acceptable if strong-tasting drink composed largely of alcohol, no more, but you didn’t really drink it for the internal effect, you drank it to show you could afford to, they put it in a special crystal field-goblet so you could show that you could. The name was meant to imply that after sinking a few you were ninety per cent certain to get laid and fifty per cent assured to ending up in legal trouble (or it may have been the other way round – Gena-Hofoen could never remember).

Some tipple!
This is the awe-inspiring and intimidating description of an Affronter space-ship

Dwarfing all the others were three huge dark craft, each of which looked vaguely as though it had been modelled by taking a free-fall aerial bomb from one age and welding onto it a profusion of broad swords, scimitars and daggers from an even earlier time and then magnifying the results until which was a couple of kilometres in length.

This classic from the Culture needs to be re-re-read endlessly…

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